Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

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  fer back to the homophobic image of homosexuality, yet also to certain realities that there is no point in denying, ones produced by homophobia and by the self-dissimulation it necessitates. In any case, gay and lesbian childhoods have a strong connection to secrecy, and this will inevitably have profound and lasting e√ect on personalities.∞∞

  9

  The Subjected ‘‘Soul’

  At the same time that someone is learning how to look at the world, learning how to occupy a place in that world, how to relate to others, it also happens that—in the deepest mental structures of that person—the fact is recorded that there are insults used to designate certain people. These people are presupposed to have certain characteristics in common (in this case, certain sexual practices and a certain psychological identity), whether those characteristics be real or imaginary, natural or produced out of a shared history. All this training is almost consubstantial with training in language. One learns early on that there are people who can be called ‘‘faggot’’ or ‘‘dyke,’’ and one of the most formidable and e√ective aspects of this insult is the way it operates as a kind of censorship, the formulation of a prohibition addressed to everyone in the way that it decrees, guarantees, and reinforces the heterosexual norm, barring access to that which is stigmatized by language. Of course, this prohibition’s e√ect is more deeply imprinted on those who, in some confused way, know from their earliest years that they are one of these

  ‘‘abnormal’’ beings designated by such words of hatred. We should add that it is not the case that everyone who will become homosexual is privy to this confused knowledge about themselves. To the contrary, insult itself prevents a good number of individuals from gaining access to this information about themselves, to this consciousness of themselves; it ‘‘slows down’’ their life in the dimension of the sexuality that will later be their own.∞

  Of course, the insult ‘‘faggot’’ is not exclusively directed at those who are suspected of being one. It has a sort of universal applicability. Anyone of the male sex, of any age, can be subjected to this insult at any time—on a school playground or in a tra≈c jam, for instance. Bourdieu has quite accurately remarked that the expression ‘‘faggot’’ often refers to nothing more than the perception by the popular classes of bourgeois ways of speech or bodily

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  habits that are thought of as too refined and therefore not virile. In this context, the insult would have no necessarily sexual connotation in the strict sense of the term, given that it does not necessarily attribute to the person being addressed a particular sexual orientation.≤ Still, even here the insult makes clear reference to an implicit hierarchy—one experienced as if self-evident—between what is perceived as masculine and what is perceived as feminine. Moreover, the insult here also links (in the case of men, of course) masculinity to heterosexuality and femininity to homosexuality. Thus even in this case one cannot finally assume that the insult is entirely free from sexual signification, for this is the very hierarchy on which is based not only the social ‘‘inferiority’’ of women but also the stigmatization of homosexuals.

  In any case, whatever the motivation of the person wielding the insult, it undeniably functions as a call to order, sexually speaking. Even if the person at whom the insult is being directed is not homosexual, the insult makes clear not only that being homosexual is worthy of condemnation, but that everyone considers it shameful even to be accused of being so.≥

  To the extent that insult defines the horizon of one’s relation to the world, it produces a fateful feeling in a child or an adolescent who feels himself or herself to be contravening the world’s order as well as a lasting and even permanent feeling of insecurity, anxiety, and even terror and panic. Numerous studies have shown that the rate of suicides or attempted suicides among gay youth is considerably higher than among young heterosexuals.∂

  It is the terror faced with one’s impossible fate that all gay people (I mean those who feel themselves to be such from their youth, those who discover themselves to be so much later, or those who fight against themselves in order not to know or admit that they are so) must overcome at some moment of their lives if they want, once they have decided no longer to resign themselves—as so many do—to hiding what they are, to be able to live out a life that would include what they are. To choose to be what you are can attenuate or annul the weight of ‘‘deviance’’ that is lived as a personal drama. The recomposition of one’s own subjectivity, inscribing oneself in ‘‘practices of friendship’’ and of visibility, are all factors that can help to e√ace the heavy sense of fate.

  An entire gay cultural tradition has fostered the belief that visibility would encourage hostile attention and even further oppression. This tradition, handed down from periods when social repression was much more intense,

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f is still lively today. It can be found in the appeals of certain gay people for a kind of ‘‘assimilation’’ that could be taken as a form of ‘‘discretion,’’ which is more often than not merely another way of advocating dissimulation, here envisioned as the simplest way to avoid the forces of alienation and the violence of stigmatization. Yet it seems quite obvious that oppression can take a much more intense hold on what remains invisible or secret, especially to the extent that oppression is understood as an interiorization of domination in the mind of the dominated that guarantees submission to the sexual order and its hierarchies.

  This is perfectly clear in the case of insults: for their stigmatizing e√ects to work it is not necessary that the stigmatized characteristic be apparent for all to see. Stigmatization works even before I become its direct victim. A given individual does not need to be actually ‘‘discredited’’ if he is already

  ‘‘discreditable.’’ The very fact of being ‘‘discreditable’’ (and of knowing that one is, and of fearing being ‘‘discredited’’) acts on individuals both consciously and unconsciously as a subjectivizing force, a force of interiorized domination, all the more e√ective given the fear of being discovered and the self-censoring necessary in order to avoid being so.∑ ‘‘Visibility’’ does not, of course, disable oppression, and it is not capable of thwarting the subjugating processes of surveillance, of policing, of the norm, for it cannot in and of itself cause insult or the social dissymmetry of which it is the symptom to disappear. But, despite appearances, insult does not have a more violent e√ect on someone who is ‘‘visible’’ than on someone who is not, even if someone who is identifiably gay may more frequently be directly insulted than someone who keeps his or her sexuality hidden. For visibility, insofar as it is a manner of assuming and laying claim to an identity that has been stigmatized by insult, partially defuses the charge of social violence that insult carries. It o√ers no foothold to insult; on the contrary, it is perhaps a reflective surface that wards o√ insult and destroys, even if only partially, its terrible e√ectiveness.

  In insult, it is one’s inner sanctum that is threatened, one’s heart of hearts, what the spiritual tradition calls the ‘‘soul.’’ If a well-targeted insult provokes such a strong echo in the consciousness of the person at whom it is directed, it is because this ‘‘soul’’ has been created through socialization in a world of insult and inferiorization. One could even say that the soul is nothing other than the e√ect of this socialization. As Foucault put it, the

  ‘‘soul’’ is the ‘‘prison of the body’’ and it is of no use to dissimulate one’s bodily gestures from the inquiring gaze of a homophobic society in an e√ort

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  to protect the soul from subjectivation. For the soul is not simply the object, the target, of a training process, it is also, and primarily, the e√ect of that
process. And so it remains its tool.∏

  It is therefore this ‘‘soul’’ that must be reinvented, refashioned. Certainly no such process can take place under the sign of ‘‘discretion,’’ for the obligation or the will to discretion, to hide oneself, are nothing but the products of the subjected soul, inferiorized and conscious of its inferiorization. I am, of course, aware that the majority of gay people hardly have a choice in this matter. They are required to disguise themselves in their hometown or at work; they must lie to their family and friends (to their parents certainly, but sometimes also, for gay men who married before knowing what they were or before assuming their identity, to their wives, or to their husbands for certain lesbians, and sometimes to their children). But the discourse that would transform this obligation to dissimulate and this real alienation into a political choice, the discourse that has as its corollary the denunciation of any and all manifestations of collective visibility, merely ratifies such situations and helps perpetuate them instead of contesting the social order that sets them up.

  The result of the inculcation of structures of domination into the minds of the dominated is that an insult can even be used by those at whom it will later be directed—or who already know that they are potential or even real targets.

  What ‘‘faggot’’ has not one day or another called someone exactly that, or referred in passing to someone as ‘‘that faggot,’’ perhaps during his childhood, his adolescence, or even much later? This is simply because we are as much spoken by language as we are speakers of it and also most certainly because making such an accusation, assigning that stigma to someone else, is a way—certainly an illusory one—of guarding against it for oneself. Self-hatred, interiorized homophobia—these are clearly among the strongest e√ects of the structural relation to the world that is created by the preexistence of insult.

  But self-hatred is not merely an unhappy relation to oneself, one which forces a person into a double life filled with the fear of discovery. It also leads to behaviors based on hatred and hostility toward those others in whom one sees, and wishes to refuse the sight of, an image of oneself. Here we could think of the remarks Proust makes about ‘‘Sodomites’’ who ‘‘are so readily admitted into the most exclusive clubs that, whenever a Sodomite fails to

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f secure election, the black balls are for the most part cast by other Sodomites, who make a point of condemning sodomy, having inherited the mendacity that enabled their ancestors to escape from the accursed city’’ (rtp, 2:655).

  Or one could think of the story told by Christopher Isherwood of his failed attempt in 1934 to bring his German companion Heinz (who wanted to flee from the growth of Nazism in his country) to England, passing him o√ as an employee of his mother. The immigration agent, after making a perfidious comment about the true nature of the relation between Isherwood and his lover, a relation the agent had had no trouble understanding, refused Heinz entry onto British soil. Here is what W. H. Auden, who was with Isherwood, had to say about the painful scene: ‘‘As soon as I saw that bright-eyed little rat, I knew we were done for. He understood the whole situation at a glance—because he’s one of us. ’’π Precisely because he is himself homosexual the agent understands the situation, and precisely because he is homosexual he refuses to admit the young German man to Britain, in a characteristic demonstration of hatred of oneself in another and the desire to disassociate oneself from that other.

  I have always read this episode from Isherwood’s wonderful book as a

  kind of parable, and every time I hear or read of a gay man who, in order to prove his conformist credentials and his submission to the heteronormative order, denounces the very existence of a gay movement, I cannot avoid thinking of the expression Auden uses in order to make clear his disgust when faced with that British immigration o≈cial.

  So many other examples could be provided of this hatred of gays by other gays, and there is no point in recalling that depressing list one more time here. Let it su≈ce to mention the two menacing figures of Roy Cohn, advisor to Senator McCarthy, who led the witch hunt against gay men in the early 1950s (and who died of aids thirty years later), and of J. Edgar Hoover, longstanding director of the fbi, who relentlessly kept track of the homosexuality of various politicians the better to control them, yet who we now know himself lived with a man and on occasion dressed in drag to welcome guests to dinner parties he gave at his home.

  Such a characteristic is not specific to gays. Self-hatred and the concomitant hatred of others who are like you have been the subject of many studies.

  Kurt Lewin has provided a great deal of surprising material in his study of Jewish antisemitism.∫ It seems to be a question of a will to wipe out that which one is. We could include here the desire of many gay men to become heterosexual—and some make an enormous e√ort in this direction (marry-

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  ing, undergoing a psychoanalytic ‘‘cure’’). In any case, there are many who regret or deplore as a kind of curse the fact of being gay. Generations of gay men have been obsessed by the idea that they would need to change in order to be happy or simply to be able to live. Lionel Ovesey and Abram Kardiner, in their classic work on African Americans, have shown how the ‘‘mark of oppression’’ is inscribed in the conscious and unconscious minds of the oppressed not only as a di≈culty in living out what one is, but also as a radical rejection—one that can take many forms—of what one is. They report, for example, that blacks in their dreams imagine that they or their children have become white.Ω And clearly the fantasy or the illusion that it is possible to ‘‘change’’ is all the more likely to be more widespread among gays than among blacks. It is thus perfectly comprehensible why political movements that take up the task of struggling against these forms of oppression—and their interiorizations—choose as slogans ‘‘Black is beautiful’’

  and ‘‘Gay is good.’’

  Insult and its e√ects are not simply limited to defining an exterior horizon. Insult creates an interior space of contradiction in which are found all the di≈culties a gay person will meet before being able to assume his or her identity, before being able to accept being identified with or identifying with other gay people. It is this identification which is first rejected; but then it must, as a place from which to start, be constructed or at least accepted—

  even if later its importance or its signification may lessen.

  10

  Caricature and Collective Insult

  Insult is intensified and reinforced through images and caricature. Throughout the ages, homosexuality has given rise to a proliferation of devalorizing and degrading images, especially caricatures (but also images from film or television, which often simply provide in di√erent ways images close to those from the tradition of caricature).∞ Caricature is, of course, closely related to insult, as Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, inspired by the Freudian analysis of jokes, have noted.

  Freud defines a joke as a sort of outlet for hostile impulses, an ‘‘allusion’’

  to an unspoken insult that forms the background of the joke.≤ Kris and Gombrich interpret ‘‘caricature’’ as the equivalent of such a mechanism in the visual realm. It is a veritable form of symbolic aggression; it enacts violence, and places itself, according to Kris and Gombrich, in the lineage of the ‘‘defamatory images’’ of the Middle Ages.≥ Homophobic caricature (like antisemitic caricature) is a ‘‘defamation’’; it ‘‘alludes’’ to insult; it places itself within the horizon of insult and draws upon the mental schemas that produce laughter at the sight of gay people. It expresses the inferiority assigned to homosexuality within society and perpetuates the mental structures that ground that inferiority. It ‘‘alludes’’ to the immemorial condemnation of homosexuality and is thereby an acknowledgment of all the social, cultural, political, and juridical violence of which gay people ar
e the object.

  But it is not directed merely at a given individual, who is made fun of personally (the joke often relying on a representation of that person as e√eminate). It claims to reveal the objective ‘‘truth’’ about an entire group by way of a magnifying glass o√ered to the reader or the spectator by the humorous image.∂

  Caricature always o√ers a ‘‘group portrait.’’ It is the portrait of a collective, of a ‘‘species’’ defined by a set of traits that anyone can immediately

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  recognize. A drawing of an e√eminate man ‘‘represents’’ male homosex-

  uals—all of them—even when one knows this has no basis in reality. It is rather striking to remark, for example, among all the caricatures and derogatory images that flourished at the moment of the Eulenburg a√air in Germany, how much of the humor relied on decking out soldiers with handbags and lace handkerchiefs, as if to heighten the contrast between the assumed masculinity of the soldier and the supposed e√eminacy of the homosexual.∑